"Please, God," I pleaded, "let Mommy live." The lights were all out in my neighbor's house where I was spending the night. It was way past midnight, and the only other time I had ever been up this late was to go to midnight Christmas Eve service. You see, I was in second grade, just two weeks past my eighth birthday.

My family had sent me to stay with my friend Karen Christopher for the night. Her backyard and mine shared a common border. This was not a weekend sleepover, but rather a school night. I had been sent to her house as everyone knew the night would end in death in my home. My mother was reaching the end of her six-month battle with liver cancer.

Not that it was much of a battle -- I'm told her body had withered to nothing, and she was much too weak to fight back.
I can't attest to that except for what I've been told because my mother had kept me at a distance, afraid my being witness to her slow destruction would scar me. I remember nothing of her months of suffering until this night when memory of my life restarts with a vivid flash.

I sat up in the bed I was sharing with my friend Karen and stared out her window into the one window that was lighted in my house. That is where they were keeping vigil, waiting for Mommy to gasp her last breath. They kept vigil from her bedside, I from the window across the yard, and I prayed. I made bargains with the God I studied in Sunday school each week. I prayed ardent words not on my normal list of nightly bedtime prayers. No "now I lay me's" tonight. Tonight I begged for one huge favor and promised I would never ask for anything again.

Sometime after midnight on May 28, 1959 the light went out in my mother's room. I knew why. Later that afternoon my next door neighbor, Dr. Smith, a retired Baptist minister, met me at the bus stop to tell me what I already knew. I guess nobody in my family had the heart to do it, and a minister seemed such a good choice. He was a kindly old man. His words are lost to my memory, but the feeling that gripped me is not.

The next week was a flurry of Mommy's brothers and sisters arriving from Long Island for the funeral and people's hugging me. Someone decided funerals were not for children as my mother had decided her dying was not for me, so I did not attend. Adults shut me out of my own life for "my own good." They meant well. I have forgiven them.

I was left with plenty of time to contemplate events on my own. God had not granted my mother a reprieve. I had asked so sincerely, I, a sinless little child, on behalf of a kind mother. What was I to make of this? Was it time to give up on belief in the God of my bedtime prayers?

The answer came to me with little philosophizing. It did not take weeks and months of agonizing doubt. God simply told me in that gentle voice He uses to speak to children that He had not forsaken me. He would give me the strength to cope with my sadness and loneliness, and He would take care of Mommy for me from now on. God, I discovered through this loss in my life, does not reprieve some because they pray and condemn others to death because they do not have faith. God lets those matters unfold as life would have them.

God granted me strength, not a special favor. It had never been my right to ask. I have never since that night made my prayers supplications for outcomes. Instead, I pray for strength and wisdom for myself or for friends and relatives. It is not that God refuses to grant us the outcome we desire - it is that this is not the way He works.
Good, kind, giving, loving people die and suffer other setbacks in life each day. Unkind, greedy, selfish people recover from diseases or avoid major injury in accidents.
The drunken driver survives while the family he broadsided all die. This does not mean He is rewarding the bad and failing to reward the good. It just means that life does not always follow our rules of fairness.

My faith never wavered after my mother's death. Not for one moment did I believe God had disappeared from my life. It is for God to know why He claims a small child's mother, not for me to comprehend. Faith is not a belief to claim when things are going well and to lose when life takes a "wrong" turn. My faith has sustained me many times since that night when my mother's bedroom light dimmed. It will sustain me until that day when I am again in her embrace.